Top Democrat on House intelligence committee says Trump was setting the stage to seize control of midterm elections
“I’m not an alarmist”, congressman Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, just told MSNOW after Donald Trump’s speech, “but understand what happened tonight: the president was setting the context, he was setting the basis for him to turn around, at midnight on Election Day and say, ‘I warned you, I warned you back in July that the Chinese were doing XYZ and the Venezuelans were doing XYZ and all this terrible stuff. It happened tonight. I am deploying, federal officers from the Department of Homeland Security as the seven states, they will be seizing ballot boxes in those states because we know that lots of undocumented aliens, voted in those states. So we are seizing ballot boxes”.
“What happens when all of a sudden we’ve lost the chain of custody of 70 ballot boxes? Himes added. “That is the moment in which American democracy dies.”
“Part of the energy you’re hearing from me tonight is the fact that I was one of the last people out of the chamber of the House of Representatives on January 6th 2021,” Himes also said. “I saw our democracy come this close to ending. And the energy you are hearing from me tonight is that I actually I see the path, and this is the moment for every American to go to whitehouse.gov, as the president asked you to do, to look at the China section, to read the report.”
Himes added that his former colleague, John Ratcliffe, who is now the CIA director released a carefully worded statement which said just that his agency “produced key intelligence reporting” but did not assert that any foreign interference in the 2020 election had actually taken place.
According to Ratcliffe, that intelligence showed only that “Venezuela’s government had developed capabilities to manipulate electronic voting systems, raising serious concerns for U.S. election infrastructure security” and that China tried “to influence the 2020 election against President Trump”, not that either nation had actually tried to or succeeded at manipulating vote totals in the election Trump lost.
We will be taking the congressman’s advice and carefully evaluating the actual material produced by the White House to back Trump’s latest wild claims about the 2020 election in the hours ahead, and will report back soon with our findings.
Key events
Fox News tells viewers it has not seen evidence for Trump’s claims about voting machines
Immediately after airing Donald Trump’s speech, a Fox News correspondent, Aishah Hasnie, told viewers that the pro-Trump broadcaster, which was forced to pay a $787.5m settlement to the voting machine company Dominion for broadcasting false claims that Dominion was involved in a plot to steal the 2020 election, could not verify that he had been telling the truth.
The president, she explained, made “claims that electronic voting machines are vulnerable and easily compromised. Fox News has not seen the evidence yet, is not in a position to evaluate the accuracy of the president’s statements and claims at this time.”
Chuck Schumer not convinced by Trump’s shouted demand for crackdown on voting
Near the end of his speech, an angry Donald Trump raised his voice to shout that he wants his federal takeover of voting in the United States to be passed, in a deeply partisan attack on Democrats.
“Addressing this crisis of election security demands that Congress must pass the Save America Act. How easy is that to do? Unless you want to cheat. The only reason you wouldn’t do it is you want to cheat because your policies are so bad, and your candidates are so pathetic that you can’t get away or can’t get elected any other way,” the president said, his voice dripping with sarcasm and disdain.
Somehow that appeal did not win over Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader in the US Senate.
“Not now. Not ever. The SAVE Act is dead on arrival in the United States Senate,” Schumer responded on social media in response to Trump’s angry demand.
Trump concludes speech on supposed shambles of US election system with pitch for mandatory photo ID for voters
Donald Trump just concluded a 25-minute speech, shouting at times despite a hoarse voice, as the deeply unpopular president tried to spark a groundswell of support from the nation for his proposed crackdown on what he cast, without allowing anyone to review what he called evidence, as an epidemic of illicit voting by large numbers of non-citizens.
The fact that no reporters were allowed to even see the documents Trump cited in his speech as proof of a hopelessly corrupt election system, penetrated by foreign actors and wide open to corruption and rigging by his rivals, was perhaps an intentional choice by the administration.
It will take some time to sort through the information that was not released by the White House until Trump started speaking, but we will bring you reporting, analysis and fact-checking as we develop it.
Trump claims US election system is ‘so broken and so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it’
In his ongoing speech, Donald Trump referred to a barrage of supposed evidence that the US election system is hopelessly corrupt and broken, cherry-picked from intelligence assessments, to support his claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that the country’s midterm elections are “vulnerable to being rigged and stolen” unless radical changes are made to the voting system in ways that will make it much harder for voters to cast ballots.
Once the president finishes, we will begin the work of sifting through the documents.
“Congress must pass the Save America Act!” Trump shouted at one stage, casting the legislation he has said will enable Republicans to win every election as a commonsense reform.
The president also said that mail-in ballots are inherently corrupt and called for a near total ban on the process.
Trump claims US intelligence agents ‘worked to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China’s sinister election meddling’
Donald Trump’s speech is packed with what he claims are new revelations from suppressed intelligence documents just posted on the White House website which, he claims, show “that members of the deep state – very, very famous group of people, in many cases in our intelligence agency – worked to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China’s sinister election meddling”.
“Covering it up from both the president and the American people like nobody thought was possible, US spy agencies began learning about the compromise of voter registration files in 2020,” Trump claimed.
Readers should be aware that no one has yet had time to independently examine these documents, making real-time fact-checking of the president’s claims impossible – which might be the point of presenting this avalanche of information all at once, as the president makes hyperbolic claims that it proves all of his lies about the 2020 election.
Trump says White House is releasing intelligence documents on elections
Speaking in a hoarse voice, Donald Trump just announced that the White House is posting declassified intelligence documents on its website that reveal “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure” and claimed that China committed “the largest compromise of election data in history” in 2020, obtaining voter file data as part of “an election security nightmare”.
“Every American deserves to know that when they cast their vote, that vote will be counted accurately in a system, and that is to make that system secure. One where cheating and interference are not just difficult, but virtually impossible. Unfortunately, the system we have today falls catastrophically short of that standard. Tonight, I’m announcing the immediate declassification and release of critical intelligence, revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure. This evidence shows that the election system we have dangerously exposes and really exposes like levels never thought possible to hacking,” Trump said.
The first several minutes of Trump’s speech have included nothing new of any kind, with the president reciting familiar talking points about what a great job he is doing. Then he pivoted to his claim that drastic action is needed to ensure US elections are fair, calling the current system riddled with “shocking vulnerabilities”.
Donald Trump begins widely anticipated address to the nation
Donald Trump has just started speaking from the East Room of the White House, in what is expected to be a speech on the 2020 election loss he still refuses to accept. The president has begun with a typical recitation of boasts about what he claims are his accomplishments.
We have embedded live video above. Follow along for updates.
MS Now reports that the White House hosted a briefing for about two dozen pro-Trump conspiracy theorists and election deniers this week, led by the conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who was on Donald Trump’s notorious phone call with Georgia’s top election official on 2 January 2001, in which the president asked for 11,780 votes for Joe Biden to be tossed out, which would have enabled Trump to win the state’s 2020 presidential election by a single vote.
One of the participants told the broadcaster the presentation “was basically all the media reporting that John Solomon and others have done already.”
Solomon, a former Associated Press reporter turned far-right media figure, became a special government employee of the White House last month. He has reportedly been working with Bill Pulte, Trump’s acting director of national intelligence, to declassify documents on alleged efforts by foreign nations to interfere in US elections.
After meeting Todd Blanche, Epstein survivor urges senators to reject him as attorney general
Annie Farmer, a survivor of sexual abuse by Jeffrey Epstein, called on US senators to reject Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Todd Blanche, his former criminal defense lawyer, after he agreed to meet her and other victims of the late sex offender who socialized with Trump for nearly two decades.
“After meeting with Todd Blanche, I feel even more confident in urging senators to vote against his confirmation as the United States’ Attorney General,” Farmer said in a statement.
She continued:
I found him abrasive, condescending, and intentionally noncommittal to survivors – a marked contrast to his public testimony during his confirmation hearing.
While quick to point to the failures of previous administrations, he refused to take accountability for mistakes made under his own leadership. Specifically, he would not commit to an inquiry into why my sister Maria Farmer’s 1996 report went uninvestigated; he refused to release documents related to internal discussions about charging Epstein that would provide important clarification about previous errors, and his explanations for his nine-hour interview with Ghislaine Maxwell and her subsequent transfer to a less secure facility were wholly dissatisfactory and contrived.
His evasiveness felt like a deliberate attempt to claim the Attorney General’s office is powerless in this matter. By passing the buck once again, he is leaving survivors trapped in the same endless loop of searching for answers and receiving none.
CBS, owned by Trump supporter, to air president’s speech live, as CNN joins ABC and NBC in not giving airwaves to president known for lying
CBS, which is now owned by the Trump supporter David Ellison, will air Donald Trump’s primetime address live, unlike the rival networks ABC and NBC, which have decided to relegate the president’s remarks to their streaming platforms.
CNN has also decided to not confront its viewers with the prepared remarks of a president known for incessant lying, particularly about the likely subject of the speech: his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, which appears to have inflicted a psychic wound so grave Trump is unable to get over it.
CNN’s chief media analyst, Brian Stelter, reports that CNN will make a live feed of the remarks available online, with analysis and commentary, but not air it live on television.
“CNN will cover the President’s speech as a news event, and monitor it for news developments, providing analysis and commentary from CNN experts who cover elections, intelligence and the FBI,” Stelter quoted a spokesperson for the network saying.
Both Fox News and the Fox broadcast network, also owned by the Trump-supporting Murdoch family, plan to carry the president’s remarks live, just three years after their parent company was forced to pay a $787.5m settlement to the voting machine company Dominion for knowingly broadcasting false claims that Dominion was involved in a plot to steal the 2020 election.
Former Trump lawyer says president is looking for an excuse ‘to declare an emergency’ before midterms
Ty Cobb, a lawyer who coordinated Donald Trump’s legal response, during his first term, to the special counsel investigation of his campaign’s ties to Russia, told PBS News Hour on Thursday that he fears that “tonight’s speech is intended to add to the predicate that he needs to declare an emergency at or about the time of the elections”.
Cobb, who has become a critic of the president, predicted that Trump will try “anything” to disrupt the midterm elections his party is widely expected to lose, opening the door to a third impeachment.
“Steve Bannon and Todd Blanche have suggested that there will be ICE agents at the polls,” Cobb said. “I think that that’s a virtual certainty. Whether that will include the national guard or not, we don’t know, but anything to intimidate minority voters, particularly immigrant voters,.” He also suggested that the president was looking for an excuse “to try to seize voting machines as Trump wanted to do in 2020”.
“I think you will see him doing everything he can to try to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, the election of Democrats, and do whatever he can to remain in power and to keep his cronies in powers, so that he can continue doing what he thinks he’s allowed to do as president, which is anything he wants,” Cobb added.
Trump’s address follows another day of strikes he authorized against Iran.
US forces launched attacks for the sixth straight day Thursday, hitting targets near Tehran and striking a ship military officials accused of trying to break the US blockade. Iran retaliated by firing missiles and drones at US allies in the region.
There’s speculation Trump will mention his ongoing joint war with Israel against Iran in his remarks later tonight. He has claimed to be close to a deal with Iran dozens of times since April. If it does come up in his address, watch how the president spins the conflict as it stretches into its 139th day with an earlier ceasefire in shambles, peace talks in limbo and gas prices ticking higher again.
To air or not to air? That is the question news networks are mulling before Trump’s address
While the president aims for wall-to-wall primetime coverage, some TV networks are playing it safe in an effort to avoid giving Trump airtime to spout more unproven or debunked conspiracy theories to the viewing public – at least for traditional TV viewers. Brian Stelter, CNN’s chief media analyst, reported that NBC and ABC plan to stream Trump’s address online, but won’t carry it live on TV.
In a statement Stelter shared from ABC, the network said its “Special Report team is fully prepared to break into network programming to deliver live updates and reporting should significant developments occur”.
As for NBC, network officials said they “plan to air a special report on the network following the remarks”.
Democrats pre-bunk Trump’s long-running election denials before his address
That includes Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, US senators from Georgia, and Angela Alsobrooks, US senator from Maryland.
Alsobrooks said the administration’s ongoing attacks against election workers and “illegal” raids on election offices are designed to prevent eligible US citizens from voting:
“Let’s let that sink in as we watch the false claims from this president, who, bless his heart, just cannot accept what all of the evidence has shown us: is that there is nothing improper that happened in 2020.”
Ossoff was more pointed in his remarks:
“Here’s what’s going to happen tonight: the world’s most famous sore loser will deliver a prime-time presidential sour grapes address to pursue his six-year-old grievances about the 2020 election, while his war in the Middle East spirals out of control and the cost of living continues to rise for Americans across the country.”
Ossoff’s fellow senator Warnock offered this statement on Trump’s speech:
“Donald Trump lost Georgia in 2020. That’s not my opinion, it’s a fact. The votes were counted, recounted, audited and litigated. He lost, he lost, he lost. But this really isn’t about 2020. It’s about 2026. He is trying to sow doubt on the integrity of our elections in Georgia so that he can create the pretext to interfere in 2026. This president is a liar, a cheater and a fraud. And he has shown us over and over again that staying in power matters more to him than anything else.”
Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, returned from maternity leave Thursday and teased the president’s upcoming address from the White House briefing room.
Fielding questions about the substance of the president’s televised address tonight – specifically, reports that Trump plans to unveil new claims of interference in the 2020 election, despite the lack of evidence of widespread fraud – Leavitt argued that the president remains focused on the results because “the media has refused to acknowledge that tens of millions of Americans share his concerns about the sanctity of our elections”.
She added that Trump’s forthcoming “findings will shock you”, urging viewers to tune in. “Everything he is saying will be backed by facts and by evidence that will be provided this evening,” she said.
Trump set to address nation tonight
Welcome to our liveblog with coverage of Donald Trump’s Thursday night address from the White House. The president is slated to begin his remarks at 9pm ET.
While there’s not a complete picture of what he will say, Trump and White House officials have indicated his remarks will include one of his favorite obsessions: his long-repeated claims, without evidence, that US elections were rigged against him by Democrats in 2020 when he lost to Joe Biden.
Trump hinted at the content of his comments from the Oval Office Tuesday, telling reporters: “It doesn’t get bigger, because without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country.”
“We’ll be discussing other things, too,” the president added, but declined to reveal more. “It’s going to be a very big announcement.”
